Can I ...Touch Them?

It starts when you're pregnant. I've seen it. People come up to you and touch your belly. Maybe the first person who does it is someone you know, maybe intimately. A relative. A gas station attendant. Next, it's some Hagitha McSaddlebags in the dairy aisle at the grocery store. It's a Christian Scientist out for a walk with his Havanese. It's a traffic cop. It's a wildlife activist. It's the Gorton's fisherman.

They're touching your fucking roundness. Palming your womb's exterior. They're running their hands over your newly-outed innie. Ingratiating themselves on you. Molesting you. They might as well be thumbing your buttonhole.

And these people, these Chester Molesters, they know they're doing something wrong-- they know it-- but they can't stop themselves. You know, like the molesters you see on "America's Most Molestery" with the moustaches and the back-parting and metal eyeglass frames from the 1980s and everything.

Want to know how I know they know they're doing something wrong? It's the way they ask, and they always ask, before they do the dirty. There's a hesitation, and it always comes after "I".

"Can I... rub your belly?"

I mean, just look at the question-- it's sitting there on the line above this one. Just look at it.

Can you rub my fucking belly? WHAT?! Are you a fucking doctor? Are you looking for tumors? No, you can't rub my fucking belly. Can I snake-finger punch you in your goddamned Adam's apple?

Here's what I want to know-- who was the first pregnant woman in the history of the world to have been asked that question, and who was the incredibly twisted baboon-perv who asked? It must have been incredibly strange for both of them. Now, of course, it's been normalized, though I can't figure out why. I mean, I get it-- some of us are a gaggle of hormones when we see a pregnant chick and we want to feel her up. That's nice. But most human beings have this thing called impulse control that reins us in when we want to touch the distended abdomens of random women or slap a congressman or put our penis inside a beehive.

Believe me, there's plenty of things in this world that I want to touch, but I don't. Because it's not normalized. Because I have impulse control. Why isn't it normal to see a pretty girl waiting for the train and walk up to her, stare at her pretty pertty nummy breasts and say, "Can I... touch them?" Today, at a craft fair, some sloppy beast was cooing at our twins, and the cooing suddenly wasn't enough stimulation for her. She looked tentatively at my wife and I and said,

"Can I... touch them?"

No. You know it's wrong. You know people go to jail for a very, very, very long time for... touching other people's children. And then, even when they come out of jail they have to wear those little ankle monitoring things and register for the offender list and move into group homes that are such-and-such miles away from school zones and playgrounds. You don't... touch people's children. And yet, there we were, at this craft fair, with this random loon-basket fondling our daughter's feet-- which is great-- a pedophile and a foot-fetishist in one go. Talk about a deal.

Can I... touch your Mercedes 300-D?

Can I... touch your pewter candlesticks?

Can I... touch your IRA and 401-K?

Can I... touch your cashmere sweater?

Can I... touch your blog?

I'm glad that there's no comparable experience to being pregnant for a man. Everything that we experience as we get older is repellent, not attractive-- especially to strangers. Can you imagine anyone coming up to me in twenty-odd years and asking if they can... touch my bald spot? Or my paunch? Or what about my jowls? My vine-like nosehairs, maybe? Maybe my comely seat-mate on some train trip in the year 2035 will want to braid them for me. I kind of doubt it though. Especially if she's pregnant.

My Salt Mine's Breath Tastes Like Salt

I go back to work tomorrow.

My wife had two babies, so I stayed home for a bit.

It's been nine weeks.

NEIN!

I was supposed to be gone for eight weeks, but I freaked out (NEIN!) and extended my leave by a week. Work didn't care. Hey, what's another week of not paying me to them?

(The answer: not much.)

I'm gold that most husbands/partners/S.O.'s don't take so much time off when their wives/partners/S.O.'s, Baby Mamma, Bitches have children. Of course, most people have single babies. Twins are kind of more complicated. More screaming. More shitting. More... there.

There there, they're there.

And they're definitely there. And, tomorrow, from roughly 5:45am when I leave the house until 3:45pm when I return, I'll be here, and they'll be there. My wife'll be there, too, until April 2nd, and she's got a couple intrepid people coming in sporadically to assist but, for the most part, she's going to be a solo act while I'm deeply entrenched in the psychiatric salt mine.

I was thinking about writing this next paragraph about how I'm preparing myself to go back. But, see, there really is no way to prepare yourself to go back to a job after nine weeks of being away. What am I supposed to do? Zen out? Read up on Clozaril? Do mental push-ups? Please-- it's bull-cock. It's like preparing to have twins in your house every waking and sleeping (HA!) second of every day.

(NEEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIN!)

Can't be done.

Stupid.

No.

SO, why try?

I'm just going to wake up tomorrow and pilot the car a little less mindlessly than I've been doing for the last year-and-a-half, and hope I remember how to interact appropriately not only with patients, but with coworkers. I hope I remember which little checkboxes to tic off and which ones to leave alone. I hope I remember to sign my name, stamp my name, and write the time-- specifying a.m. or p.m. I hope the new photocopier likes me. The old one didn't. Antisemitic piece of shit.

Faced with my inevitable return to the working world-- I'm angry more than anything. I thought I would be more hysterical and panicked, but I'm not. I'm just mad. At myself. At me. Mad at my meager earning potential. Mad at my schedule that necessitates my being at work every other weekend. Mad at the fact that we don't have gobs and gobs of money and cocaine stashed away under the floorboards that might facilitate a life of leisure for my wife and my children. Mad at this country that punishes procreatin' mothafuckas by offering them unpaid leave at a time when expenses rise dramatically and unendingly.

I'm one angry little blogger-boo.

Roar.

I suppose it's going to be alright, though. People always say that, usually when they have absolutely no idea if it's true. I suppose my wife will be alright and my kids will be alright and, if I can get through the door without bursting into tears, I'll be alright, too. I know that, in some ways, I've lost my facility-- that breezy ease with which I strolled down the hallways and knocked on patients' doors and knew everybody's name and everybody's story-- who washed their pants yesterday with cigarettes in the pocket and had a meltdown, who assaulted whom, who's on fall precautions, who's being discharged soon-- who isn't.

Well. I suppose it'll all come back. People say that to people, too. After all: working in a psychiatric hospital's just like riding a bicycle.

Isn't it?

This Old House...

...can suck my dick.

When my wife were young and stupid, and childless, and when she wasn't my wife, we'd go traipsing around quaint neighborhoods and looked at lots of charming old houses, because that's what we liked.

In the end, we bought a house that was more old than it was charming. We made it charming inside, by painting its walls all kinds of fucked up circus colors, and by adding our tchotchkies and our touches and our random piles of shit.

We have such charming random piles of shit.

1928 was a long time ago. It was before the stock market crash. It was before color television and before women going to work and women going to war. 1928 was before the "Wizard of Oz"-- that's how long ago 1928 was. Do you believe there was a time before that movie?

Our house was built in 1928 and, thus, it is eighty-four years old. When you're young and stupid, the idea of living inside a thing built before your parents were built doesn't seem absurd at all. Having lived in this house for some time, it does now. Noam Chomsky is eighty-four years old, and I wouldn't want to live inside him. I can't stand the fucking guy. Shirley Temple, I just learned, was also born in 1928. Somehow, living inside her sounds better, but only marginally.

At first, the old home was fun-- it gave us things to do. Old lady wallpaper? Let's strip it and paint! Nasty linoleum floor the color of a three-year-old's vomit? Let's rip the bejesus out of the floor and replace it! Old windows-- caked in decades and decades of lead paint? Let's....

FUCKING SHOOT OURSELVES!

See, 'cuz window replacement people don't like dealing with lead paint. And a new law was passed recently that says that they don't have to-- that the onus is on the homeowner to get an environmental hazard specialist into the home to either remove or encapsulate all the lead paint and provide the window people with a certificate of non-PB-ness before they can proceed with the work.

Can you say:

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Because, with two month-old children bleating their tiny genitals off in the next room, I sure as Christ can't!

These days, it seems that everywhere I look in this old house of ours there is something to be replaced, fixed, updated, re-done, dealt with. The windows are the obvious priority. Last year, before this fucking regulation was passed, we replaced half the windows in the house. The downstairs, mostly new windows, is toasty warm. Our bedroom and the rest of the upstairs, mostly old windows, is like living inside Shirley Temple's Kelvinator. After two horrifying nights spent shivering in our bedroom with the twins, we moved "OPERATION NEW LIFE" downstairs. The twins sleep in a pack-n-play in the dining room, the parents sleep on the sofa in the living room.

That's right, we're crashing on the couch in our own goddamn house, and we have been for over a month. And we will continue to do so until the windows are all replaced.

There's water damage on the wall in the nursery. There's water damage in the wall in the 1st floor bathroom. The roof's probably falling in because it was clearly installed by a guy with a sixth grade education. When you're feeding and changing and clothing and burping and wiping two little children, projects are no longer fun, old houses are no longer charming. You finally get why young couples buy pristine, 4.5-year-old homes in developments where the biggest dilemma they have is choosing the white, the off-white, the bone, or the creme one.

I get it now.

You win.

I can't take it anymore.

If I have to spend another month on this sofa, it's not going to be pretty.

Don't get me wrong, I love this house. We're not going to go live in a gated community because we've got "a few holes in the floor, the odd door missing" (to quote Basil Fawlty), but you can love something that makes absolutely no sense. It's nice to know that, even though we went and got married and had kids and got a mortgage and two dogs and two cars and some more gray hairs, that I'm still basically just as fucking stupid as I was before.

I was worried there for a second-- weren't you?

A Sentimental Man

"I am a sentimental man,
Who always longed to be a father.

That's why I do the best I can,
To treat each citizen of son of Oz
As son or daughter.

So, Elphaba, I'd like to raise you high,
'Cuz I think everyone deserves the fly.

And helping you with your ascent,
Allows me to feel so... parental.

For I am a sentimental man."

That's how my favorite song from "Wicked" goes. Yes. I'm a 31-year-old straight guy, and I have a favorite song from "Wicked". Wanna fight about it?

My favorite song from that show is not in the "Wicked" Easy Piano songbooks that pony-tailed tweens used at creative arts summer camps for a few years so that they could sing "Popular" and "For Good" at low-budget showcases and talent shows the world over.

"A Sentimental Man" didn't turn into a smash hit, and it isn't very memorable, or complicated, or vocally or musically interesting either, I suppose. It isn't particularly long, so it's easy to forget. One minute and seventeen seconds, the way Broadway legend Joel Grey does it anyway. Back when I worked in the creative arts, I tried to find the sheet music to the song so I could sing it at an outdoor cabaret, but I couldn't locate the music. So I sang Eric Idle's "The Galaxy Song" from "The Meaning of Life" instead.

That's life sometimes.

It's funny, because "The Galaxy Song" is a funny song, about the dimensions of the universe and the insignificance of our mortal toils and foibles, and it's sort of a modern interpretation of a patter song, the type I love to sing in G&S operettas, and, to many folks who know me, that's the sort of song they might use to identify me. But I think, to those who really know me best, "A Sentimental Man" says more about who I am, what I feel inside, how I operate, what I value and what I long for most.

Tomorrow night, at 7:00pm, my wife and I are to arrive at the hospital so that she can be induced. If all goes as it should, the twins should be making their appearance on Thursday the 15th. And my life will change forever. Because, of course, it will no longer be my life.

Well, that changed some time ago, I suppose. On October 22nd, 2006, under a chuppah covered in radiant sunflowers, I married my best buddy. A girl whom I turn towards in the car or on the couch or in the bed and sometimes just look at, because I like the way it feels. I like to look in her eyes, or at her cheeks, or her lips, or her chin. She's shorter than me, by a decent margin, and, when we hug, I like to hold her head against my chest. I love the shape of her head-- I know that sounds goofy, but sometimes I'm like that. Her head feels great against my chest and in my hand.

From that day forward, it was no longer my life. It was ours. And now ours is getting a wee bit bigger.

I had a terrifying moment of insecurity last night. As my wife and I dined in the restaurant where we had our first date, as we ate our meal alongside her father, an intelligent though disheveled psychiatrist, I suddenly felt very small in his shadow. The shadow of his expectations and his value system, and his romance with formal educational success, of which I had not very much to speak of. I'm a reasonably talented writer, but I couldn't tell you what a gerund is. To me, it sounds like a weapon used against Jews in the Holocaust.

Speaking of Jews, I felt excluded-- muted-- as my father-in-law and my wife discussed Torah portions as if they'd both just read them yesterday. I can tell you what a Torah looks like, and I know how heavy one is to carry, but that's about it. And I shared my feelings of intellectual insecurity with my wife as we lay on the couch together after the meal was over and her father meandered his way back to his hotel.

"What am I going to be able to teach them?" I asked her, "What am I going to be able to help them with?"

"You're going to teach them about how to be good people," my wife said, which, I have to say, didn't make me feel much better.

There's an insidious air of intellectual superiority about my wife's side of the family. Conversations always seem to revolve around mocking or critiquing "simpler" people in their neighborhoods or schools or workplaces when they lived in upstate New York. My father-in-law is keen to present himself as the one who's always correcting other psychiatrists medical errors, or mis-diagnoses, or over-prescribing tendencies where he works, and my mother-in-law is always one to express judgement over how other people live, but she'll be the first one to correct you if you try to do it. And maybe they do it to cover up their own flaws, or maybe they don't know they're doing it. Or maybe it's just my perception but, as many a psych patient has told me at work, "My perception is my reality".

I wish I could tell you that my terrifying moment of insecurity passed after a good night's sleep, but it hasn't. And I can't lie to you. When I first married my wife, I was petrified that I wouldn't be good enough-- not for her, for she had affirmed, by slipping that orange blossom-engraved ring onto my finger, that I was her beloved, and she was mine-- but that I wouldn't be good enough for her parents. Now I'm scared that I won't be good enough for my children.

"I guess what I am is going to have to be enough for them," was the shaky conclusion I came to last night, as my wife rubbed Hydrocortisone cream over her impossibly huge belly and its accompanying itchy stretch marks, "because I'm all they've got."

And, in the end, maybe being a sentimental man will prove to be of infinite and inestimable value to the life and heart and values and experience of a child.

Children.

It's Not Amazing, It's Genderiffic

I know something you don't know.

I know something you don't know.

I know something you don't know.

(!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Seriously, I know something you don't know.

On Tuesday, August 16th, the gender of our twinners was revealed to me and to my wife. The ultrasound tech obviously knows, but she's been sworn to secrecy by the HIPAA monster. She did mention the genders to our OB/GYN out in the hallway while my wife and I were cooing over the ultrasound picture print-outs, but I guess HIPAA doesn't cover release of medical information from ultrasound techs to OB/GYNs.

Of course, if I find out one day that it does, I'm totally suing that bitch.

See, here's the thing about this whole gender issue: Mrs. Apron decided, when we both said that we wanted to find out what the genders of the twins are, that she wanted to keep the information secret from the rest of the world. Well, the rest of the world that gives a sparrow shit. Her reasoning is that she doesn't want us, and, consequently, the twins inundated with a bunch of gender-assigned gacky shit in traditional boy/girl/lemur colors.

And I can understand that, and I can respect that. And so I am understanding that and respecting that by going along with Mrs. Apron and not revealing the genders of our twins until such time as they see fit to enter the glaring spotlights of all those papparazzi camera flashbulbs as they exit my wife's vagina, or stomach, whichever way this thing plays out.

I've got to say, though, watching those two goofballs rolling around inside her womb on that ultrasound screen was pretty amazing. And I don't use that word lightly, or even often, because it has the propensity for being annoying.

"Oh, that Bee-Gee's coverband was UH-MAZE-ING!"

"Whoa, trans-gender Thai prostitute, watching a streaming video of you having sex with that semi-retarded donkey was UH-MAZE-ING!"

"This two-for-one deal on Chobani yogurt at Genuardi's is uh. maze. ing."

That Ron Popeil Flavor-Injector you're always threatening to violate me with?

(Amazing.)

But, really, I suppose any expectant father (of TWINS! GAAHH!!!) is permitted to use the "amazing" word when staring at grainy, blue-tinged representations of his children bumming around inside of their expectant mother.

What are they going to be like?

What are they going to talk like?

What are they going to be into?

What are they going to want on their birthday cakes?

What are they going to think of their Christian friends who go on about Santa Claus?

What are they going to think of... me?

(Not to be a fucking amazing narcissist or anything, but...)

(Oh, God...)

(Sorry.)

I'm already in love, and you know how I know that? I think about them all the time. Sure, sometimes it's more worrying and less thinking, but, one way or the other, they're always on my mind. Always. Constantly.

It's kind of perseverative.

Kind of Aspergian.

I'm sort of like that.

I'm listening to "Comfort" by Deb Talan right now, and that plays frequently enough on my computer to make me wonder if I have Aspergers. I'll bet Pandora does that to lots of people.

Stupid bitch and her fucking hot box.

I suppose that what I'm trying to say is that, yeah, I don't want this to become a Daddy Blog, and I'm pretty sure I said that they day I announced that we were knocked up, but I do want this to be a place to celebrate those two nutter-butters doing somersaults and tumblebumps inside of the woman I adore.

'Cuz, let's face it, this is all pretty fucking amazing.

I Hope They're Not Boys

So, I promised that this wasn't going to turn into a Daddy Blog, but, as those little buggers are kind of on my mind (and on my wife's bladder) a lot, I'm allowed to nattle on on about it a little bit, aren't I?

When you announce that you're having twins, people say stupid shit to you. They can't help it, though-- they're sort of like dogs who impetuously slam their muzzles into your balls. You can't really yell at or blame the dog, it's just something it does. People who have heard that you're having twins are no different. Except for the fact that they're not (usually) placing their faces in your crotch.

I won't go through the litany of annoying and repetitive questions people ask you, but there is a pre-determined formula or script, believe me, and, somehow everybody knows it, because everybody recites it with very little variation and, at work, I go through this kind of annoying Q&A session with people regularly.

My wife brought home this book called "Twinsense" from the library, and it was written by some chick whose name is "Dagmara", which is funny to me because, obviously, if you're reading a book about twins, you're thinking about baby names. And there is no way in hell you're going to be thinking about "Dagmara".

You know, unless you're an idiot. But you're reading this blog, so, clearly, you're not. Unless you're one of those idiots who got here by Googling the phrase "donkey porn". Do me a favor? Stop Googling my site looking for donkey porn.

Anyway, this book, "Twinsense" features the exhaustive list of things people say to you/ask you a.) When you tell them you're having twins and b.) Once you've had and are parading around with your twins. It's funny, because people really do say this shit. What's even funnier than that is that she goes on for quite a while about how politeness is the way to deal with people who ask inane/inappropriate/annoying questions about twinnage. And I was reading that thinking, "Mm, that's mature." Except that, on the next page, she creates an intensive list of fresh/snappy/snarky retorts that you can use to answer every single question/comment listed on the previous page. And I was thinking, "Mm, that's mature."

Mrs. Apron and I are going to find out the gender, in approximately six weeks. We're not going to tell you, though, or anybody, really. It's not going to be a secret, because we'll know, but it'll be our secret, because we'll know. If it were just one, we'd leave it alone until birth but, with two, we feel like we need to know.

Mostly, in my opinion, to cut down on the amount of names we need to come up with. Seriously, it's no fucking joke. Girl names we're good on. In fact, the more baby name books I read, and the more websites I look at, I end up adding more. Boy names are, um...

Well, let's be blunt: boy names blow. They suck. They're for shit. They're fucking awful. And most of the good ones end in the letter "n", and my last name begins and ends with the letter "n", so those "n"-ending names are pretty much out, because, with my last name, those names sound ridiculous.

Let me tell you something, if these kids both turn out to be boys, we're really fucked. Not only is there going to be pee ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE, and I'm including our walls/ceilings/hair/food as part of "ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE", but these kids are most likely going to end up with some terrible-ass names.

She likes Jewish names.

I am trying to convince her that our children will have the map of Israel tattooed on their faces and their airplane hangar-sized noses such that they will not necessitate being branded with Hebjew names that scream out "JEW, JEW, JEW!"

I like names descended from the U.K.

Surprised?

Regardless of the ethno-friction between us delicious little marrieds, the simple fact remains that, even if we agreed on which nation/people the boy names ought to be descended from, they're all basically awful.

I mean, sure, there's "Hrothgar". But what if they're both boys? What boy name goes well with "Hrothgar"?